Single XFX GTS250 or 5770?

I'm not a gamer and I have to upgrade my sons puter with a new mother board, so I turn to you pros for the answer.

I have read a few reviews on both and I see that the 5770 has a gray screen issue at times, but that appears to be a Win7 deal.

This system will be running XP and I want the best bang for the buck.

I personally own a gts250 and love it, but that is because I f@h and it uses less cpu than a ati card (gpu and cpu folding same machine).

This video card will be coupled with a Q6600.

I have given a lot of thought about buying a mb that will crossfire 16x on the first slot and 8x on the second slot and using 2 4770 cards, but that would require a new power supply too. Not dead set against that idea, but we are on a budget, so we could go that route too.

No folding will be done on this system so going ati makes no difference to me.

What ya'll think I should do?

what kind of games does he play? That would greatly influence what type of card to buy.

crossfire does 8x MAX on both slots, there is no 16x on one slot and 8x on the other, otherwise they might as well make both slots 16x, which would be overkill.

5770 is a DX11 card. XP only supports DX9 at most. So that card won't be able to do any DX10/11 work on XP, making much of its modern features useless. You'd be better off with a 4870 or something around there.

In your thread title you say 5770, in your post you say 4770. Which are you talking about?
A 4770 beats a gts250 and uses a lot less power.
A 5770 stomps both.

720x770 said:

what kind of games does he play? That would greatly influence what type of card to buy.

crossfire does 8x MAX on both slots, there is no 16x on one slot and 8x on the other, otherwise they might as well make both slots 16x, which would be overkill.

5770 is a DX11 card. XP only supports DX9 at most. So that card won't be able to do any DX10/11 work on XP, making much of its modern features useless. You'd be better off with a 4870 or something around there.

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At the moment he plays World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. I had no idea that XP was limited to DX9. Sorry I misunderstood the mother specs. Why would 16 x 16 be overkill? Just curious.

Bobnova said:

In your thread title you say 5770, in your post you say 4770. Which are you talking about?
A 4770 beats a gts250 and uses a lot less power.
A 5770 stomps both.

Click to expand...

I was originally looking at the 4770 in crossfire until I did the math and discovered the needed psu upgrade. I started looking at the latest and greatest for single slot use. I threw the 4770 option in at the end as it came back to mind, just in case it was the "absolute" way to go. I didn't mean to confuse anyone.


Thanks for replies to this point.

Velocity_Stack said:

At the moment he plays World of Warcraft and Call of Duty. I had no idea that XP was limited to DX9. Sorry I misunderstood the mother specs. Why would 16 x 16 be overkill? Just curious.

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because a single video card barely maxes half the PCI bus. In crossfire there is only a couple percent loss in performance running 2 cards at 8x each.


The games u stated he plays should be fine with DX9 without needing an overly powerful card, BUT considering you're buying a card now and new you also might want to be future proofed so it'll play newer games for at least the next year or two.

+1 for 5770

With all this DX9, DX10 and DX11 talk I have one additional question.

If I build the system with 2 4770 cards running XP, will it play the DX10 and DX11 games at all?

Only if the games have a DX9 mode.

Dx9 works on XP, vista and win7.
Dx10 works on vista and win7.
Dx11 works only on win7.

Hey that's good to know. I love xp, but I'll go with windows 7 and 5770. Parts arriving Friday.

zaskarkid said:

Hey that's good to know. I love xp, but I'll go with windows 7 and 5770. Parts arriving Friday.

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Wise. If your son wants to play some DirectX 11 games he's going to love it. Also on a note: I also checked around for 5000 series and reading about artifacts and such issues. But 9 out of 10 times those are issues that come when the people posting those issues had overclocked to an unstable point. So don't worry about it.

Regards.

GUYS! Rejoice! Powercolor will shortly release a single slot version of the HD 5770!
During next Computex, in Taipei, there will also be shown low-profile versions of HD 5750 and HD 5770.